The Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP; ) was implemented in 1962 by the government of South Vietnam, with advice and financing from the United States, during the Vietnam War to combat the communist insurgency. The strategy was to isolate the rural population from contact with and influence by the National Liberation Front (NLF), more commonly known as the Viet Cong. The Strategic Hamlet Program, along with its predecessor, the Rural Community Development Program, attempted to create new communities of "protected hamlets". The rural peasants would be provided protection, economic support, and aid by the government, thereby strengthening ties with the South Vietnamese government (GVN) which was hoped would lead to increased loyalty by the peasantry towards the government.Tucker, Spencer, The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ABC-CLIO, 2011, p. 1070. Most hamlets involved restructuring existing villages with a defensible perimeter. This led to the relocation of villagers living on the outskirts. In other instances, entire villages were relocated to new locations.
Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo, a communist sleeper agent of North Vietnam who had infiltrated the South Vietnamese army, was made overseer of the Strategic Hamlet Program. He sabotaged the program and had many hamlets built in areas with a strong NLF presence and forced the program forward at an unsustainable speed, causing the production of poorly equipped and poorly defended villages and the growth of rural resentment towards the government.
The Strategic Hamlet Program was unsuccessful, failing to stop the insurgency or gain support for the government from rural Vietnamese, it alienated many and helped contribute to the growth in influence of the NLF. After President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in a coup in November 1963, the program was cancelled. Many hamlets were abandoned, destroyed or had been taken over by the NLF, with villagers moving back into their old homes or escaping the war by moving to the cities. The failure of the Strategic Hamlet and other counterinsurgency and pacification programs were causes that led the United States to decide to intervene in South Vietnam with air power and ground troops.
Background and precursor program In 1952, during the First Indochina War (19 December 1946 – 1 August 1954) French commander François de Linares, in Tonkin began the construction of "protected villages," which the French later named agrovilles. By constructing quasi-urban amenities, the French designed the agrovilles to attract peasants away from their villages. This policy was known as "pacification by prosperity." In addition to offering social and economic benefits, the French also encouraged villagers to develop their own militias, which the French trained and armed. "Pacification by Prosperity" had some success, but it was never decisive, because the settlers felt insecure, a feeling which the numerous French guard posts along the perimeter could do little to dispel so long as the Việt Minh operated at night, anonymously, and intimidated or gained the support of village authorities.Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University; 2002_Symposium Paper
Between 1952 and 1954, French officials transplanted approximately 3 million Vietnamese into agrovilles, but the project was costly. To help offset the cost, the French relied partially on American financial support, which was "one of the earliest objects of American aid to France after the outbreak of the Korean War." According to a private Vietnamese source, the U.S. spent about "200,000 dollars on the 'show' agroville at Dong Quan."The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military ... edited by Spencer C. Tucker : Dong Quan Pacification Project : 1953 (Google_books extract) After visiting the villages of Khoi Loc in Quảng Yên Province and Đông Quan in Ha Dong Province, noted Vietnam War correspondent Bernard Fall stated that, "the French strategic hamlets resembled British [Malayan] prototypes line for line." However, in contrast to the British, the French were reluctant to grant Vietnam its independence, or allow the Vietnamese a voice in government affairs; therefore, the agroville program had little effect.
The First Indochina War terminated and the 1954 Geneva Conference partitioned Vietnam into communist (north) and non-communist (south) parts and the terms North Vietnam and South Vietnam became the common usage.
Beginning in 1954, Việt Minh sympathizers in the South were subject to escalating suppression by the Diem government, but by December 1960 the National Liberation Front of Southern Vietnam had been formed and soon rapidly achieved de facto control over large sections of the South Vietnamese countryside. At the time, it is believed that there were approximately 10,000 Communist insurgents throughout South Vietnam.
In February 1959, recognizing the danger that the guerrillas posed if they had the support of the peasants, President Diem and his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, made a first attempt at resettlement. A plan was put forth to develop centers of agglomeration. Through force and/or incentives, peasants in rural communities were separated and relocated. The primary goal of the centers was to concentrate the villagers, so they were not able to provide aid, comfort, and information to the Viet Cong.
The Government of Vietnam (GVN) developed two types of centers of agglomeration. The first type, qui khu, relocated Viet Cong (VC) families, people with relatives in North Vietnam, or people who had been associated with the Viet Minh into new villages; thus, providing easier government surveillance.
The second type of relocation center, qui ap, relocated into new villages those families that supported the South Vietnamese government but lived outside the realm of government protection and were susceptible to Viet Cong attacks. By 1960, there were twenty-three of these centers, each consisting of many thousands of people.Zasloff, J.J. "Rural Resettlements in South Vietnam: The Agroville Programme", Pacific Affairs, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, Winter 1962–1963, p. 332.
This mass resettlement created a strong backlash from peasants and forced the central government to rethink its strategy. A report put out by the Caravelle group, consisting of eighteen signers, leaders of the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo sects, the Dai Viet, and dissenting Catholic groups described the situation as follows:
Tens of thousands of people are being mobilized… to take up a life in collectivity, to construct beautiful but useless agrovilles which tire the people, lose their affection, increase their resentment and most of all give an additional terrain for propaganda to the enemy.Osborne, Milton E. Strategic Hamlets in South Viet-nam: A Survey and Comparison, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1965, p. 25.
Ideological origins Truman's Point Four Program in 1949 aimed to integrate 'third world' countries—i.e., those not aligned with NATO nor the Soviets—into the capitalist liberal economy to win 'hearts and minds.' The U.S. believed that by developing the 'third world' through education, sanitation, and reforming their economic and political systems, it could bring countries ‘out of the phase where rural revolutionary forces could come to power’ and create a path towards democracy. This was a similar to the stance that the U.S. took towards colonising the Philippines.
After the failure of the Truman and Eisenhower administration, Kennedy enacted a ‘flexible response’ program, which would increase the spectrum of military responses available to the U.S. to fight counterinsurgency. This response aimed to pre-empt the conditions which lead to guerrilla warfare and ultimately local support for communist nationalism: poverty, disease and hunger. The Strategic Hamlet Program was one such example of Kennedy's 'flexible response' initiative. The strategy was guided by an integrated model of social, economic and political change, in which the intensification of the war would lead to a transformation in Vietnamese society. It was hoped that an awareness of the material benefits of capitalism would catalyse the development of a new set of modern values and loyalties.
The Strategic Hamlet Program was also closely tied to modernisation theory promoted by W.W. Rostow, underpinning US Foreign Policy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. "Kennedy, his advisers, and the American foreign aid mission began to shift away from conventional military tactics and toward a comprehensive counterinsurgency program that integrated military action with a strategy of social engineering. By the end of 1961, the administration would become committed to defeating the Vietcong through modernisation". The Program was designed to strike at the heart of the Revolution's political and social roots. US policymakers believed that, if Diem's regime became the focus of popular aspirations, “nation-building and political development might stem the tide.” W.W. Rostow believed that responses to Communist warfare would have to harness the modernisation process that the insurgents sought to exploit. Thus, efforts at containment “needed to accelerate social progress” – it was anticipated that, if momentum could take hold in undeveloped areas, and social problems could be solved, the chances of insurgents seizing power would dramatically decline. Hence the promotion of modernization was regarded as means by which to “shut the narrow window of opportunity on which aggressors depended”.
In utilising the practice of modernisation, the US expressed a confidence on a global scale that it should be a “universal model for the world”. This approach "contributed directly to justifying the militaristic approach to third world politics, above all in Vietnam”.
The concept of modernisation relied on the belief that all societies, including Vietnam, passed along a linear trajectory from 'traditional' and economically unsophisticated, to 'modern' and able to harness nature through industrialisation, technology, and literacy rates.
The practice of village relocation within the Strategic Hamlet Program, holds foundations in Rostow's modernisation theory which recommended “destroying the external supports to guerrilla insurgents”. Relocation aimed to reduce the connections between the Vietcong and the Southern Vietnamese population, aiming to deter communist influence. “Modernizers aimed to replicateby force if necessarythe stable, democratic, capitalist welfare state that they believed was being created in the United States”.
The Strategic Hamlet Program also reflected wider ideas of American Exceptionalism. In their approach towards Vietnam, the US saw itself as a moderniser and an exemplary form of democracy. “The Strategic Hamlet Program projected a national identity for the US as a credible world power ready to meet revolutionary changes”. Perceptions of Vietnamese as "backwards" and subordinate to "Western Progress" resulted in the conclusion by US analysts that the Vietnamese were “incapable of self-government and vulnerable to foreign subversion".
The US media and government spokesmen presented the Strategic Hamlet Program and its projects of village relocation and social engineering as “reflections of benevolent American power”. In challenging communism against the backdrop of the Cold War, the Strategic Hamlet Program “revised older ideologies of imperialism and manifest destiny” stemming from notions of American Exceptionalism.